Author: JF Ptak

The Poem-amatic Fist Microscope and the Production of Art

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“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can
warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my
head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I
know it. Is there any other way?”
––Emily Dickinson

“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own
melting.”
––Robert Frost

I want to say right in the beginning that I mean no disrespect in any form in addressing the “found” nature of poetry in the larger landscape of the written word–a sort of Poetry Brut, awaiting discovery.   And the discovery is made rather simply, and randomly; take your fist, clench it, and then open it to about the size of a dime so that you can see all the way across the interior of the fist,your eye placed at the “objective” made by the joined thumb and index finger. Get out a book, then press your eye against this “lens”, placing it about a foot above a printed page. Force your eye to bring the words into focus–if you were glasses for reading you may not need them for this exercise–I don’t. You can adjust the “focus” by making the opposite lens (formed by the pinky) a little smaller. You’ve made a simple pinhole eyeglass with your hand. Now bring your new optical tool to bear on a paragraph and record what you are allowed to see, recording each bit on a new line (as in a “standard” poetic format. The results may be interesting!

My two examples are below: the first is from Paul Klee’s Diaries (and entry for 1916), and the second from Richard Allestreel’s The Ladies Calling (an instructional for women printed in 1673). Of course the Klee was already clsoe enough to poetry as it was, and teh Allestreel not far behind that; but the words rearranged give them an entirely new feeling, their messages both plainer and more hidden.

This is a useless exercise in almost every way, though it was fun to do it, and it did help to point out some of the more-poetic aspects of these two works. But poetry isn’t just putting prose into a new printed format, nor is prose poetry writ bigger.   But it was a little fun.

Example 1:
From Paul Klee’s Diaries, Trip to Tunisia, 16 April 1916, chapter 2:

In the evening, through the streets. A café decorated with pictures. Beautiful watercolors. We ransacked the place buying. A street scene around a mouse. Finally someone killed it with a shoe. We landed at a sidewalk café. An evening of colors s tender as they were clear…

And then Dissected and Rearranged with the Fist Microscope:

In the evening, through the streets
a café decorated with pictures
Beautiful watercolors, we ransacked
the place buying a street scene around a mouse.
Finally someone killed it
with a shoe.
We landed at a sidewalk café,
an evening of colors
as tender as they were clear

Example 2
The Ladies Calling
attributed to Richard Allestreel Oxford: Printed at the Theater, 1673
Part II Section III: On Widows (opening paragraph)

“Now those Remains are of three sorts, his body his memory, and his children. The most proper expession of her love to the first, is in giving it an honorable Enterrment; I mean not such as may vye with the Poland extravagance (of which ’tis observed that two or three neer succeeding funeralls ruin the family) but prudently proportion’d to his quality & fortune, so that her zeal to his Corps may not injure a nobler relique of him, his Children. And this decency is a much better instance of her kindness, then all those Tragical Furies wherwith som. Women seem transported towards their dead Husbands, those frantick Embraces and caresses of a Carcass, which betray a little too much the sensuality of their Love. And it is somthing observable, that those vehement Passions quickly exhaust themselvs, and by a kind of Sympathetic Efficacy as the Body (on which their affection was fixt) moulders, so does that also, nay often it attends not those lesurely degrees of dissolution, but by a more precipitate motion seems rather to vanish then consume”

And then Dissected and Rearranged with the Fist Microscope:

Now those Remains are his body his memory,
his children. The most proper expession of her love to the first,
is in giving it an honorable Enterrment;
I mean not such as the Poland extravagance
prudently proportion’d to his quality & fortune,
may not injure a nobler relique of him, his Children.
And this decency is a much better instance of her kindness,
then all those Tragical Furies
Women seem transported towards their dead Husbands,
those frantick Embraces and caresses of a Carcass,
which betray a little too much
the sensuality of their Love.
somthing observable, that those vehement Passions
quickly exhaust themselvs,
and by a kind of Sympathetic Efficacy as the Body (on which their affection was fixt) moulders, so does that also,
nay often it attends not those lesurely degrees of dissolution,
but by a more precipitate motion
seems rather to vanish then consume.

Yes I am joking. Mostly.

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Bad Ideas
Celebrating a Good Idea that Sounds Silly: Concrete Ships

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This 1919 pamphlet’s title certainly sound more odd than the concept it describes: concrete boats have been around for a long time, (160 years at least), and they make a lot more sense than a quick-think would give them (lumbering, unstoppable, heavy prep trucks come to mind). For boats over 25 feet long, it is probably the easiest and cheapest material to employ, and it doesn’t need weatherproofing. And, as an interesting website dedicated to concrete boats (ferro-boats) observes, a 30-foot 8-ton displacement ship made of either wood or concrete will weigh the same, which means that the very first image that comes into our heads when you say “concrete ship” is just wrong.

It looks like the French were the first to come up with the idea in about 1848, patenting the most winning methods of construction in 1855. Since then there have been 12,000 or so of these 25-ft+ ships built, including a 130′ yacht and a 120′ British sub. This method of construction certainly saw its time, especially during wartime, when steel production was in high demand.

Please note: posts over the next seven days or so will be somewhat truncated; I’m moving my store so time is a little scarce. Thanks for bearing with me.

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Fantastic Titles — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Title Page Art, Beautiful
A History of Dots, Part II: the Dot Cipher, 1810

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This is
the second in a series on the History of the Dot. This engraving of the ingenious and very
once-upon-a-time difficult-to-break cipher appeared in the mammoth (45-volume) Cyclopædia,
or The New Cyclopaedia, or, Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences, edited by Abraham Rees (1743-1825). The
book was published between 1802 and 1820, and was the work of 100 contributors,
who generally wrote monograph-length entries, as the completed effort ran close
to 40 million words. I’ve particularly enjoyed
the illustrations—some of which have become iconic—and especially the fine and
deep engraving of Wilson Lowry.

The engraving, “Writing by Cipher”,
employs dots placed above, on and below a line, representing the numbers 1,2
and 3, respectively, which in turn form one of four numbers which are letters;
a key would then be transmitted to reference the letters formed by the dots to
the alphabet. It was a tough bugger to
break, and survived most of the 19^th century without being
broken.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Thinking the Unthinkable Department: Moving DC to the Rocky Mountains. Or Idaho. 1952

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Sylvian Kindall’s Total Atomic Defense (published by a very severly right-wing publisher in 1952) is one of a series of books made for a deceived American population, offering the general reader both fear and hope, often from the same, exact source. But Kindall has a somewhat diffident approach, offering his belief that the country and its population can largely survive an all-out nuclear war–intact. Of course the “intactness” is dependent upon massive internal change of the social and industrial fabric of the country, which would have to transform in ways as to make it largely unidentifiable from that which we would quickly recognize. A quick look at the table of contents tells the story in miniature, with the exception of the solution to the problem, which was generally to build underground. (The neutron bomb would soon complicate this solution.) Suffice to say that Dr. Strangelove would approve of the publication of such a work though would hardly believe in any of it for himself.

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Bad Ideas
American Cities at the End of the World: a List of Nuclear Targets, 1953

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“Those who control the present control the future. Those who
control the future control the past.” –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Political language — and with variations this is true of
all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make
lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of
solidity to pure wind”. –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict
accordance
with the limitations and incapacities of the human
misunderstanding.”—Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary

Making the unthinkable thinkable was the de facto aim of
this pamphlet. It described the complete
vulnerability of any nation in total “atomic war”, yet proceeded to advise the
population of the United
States
to proceed as actors in a drama that
could have variant endings. And so began
the concept of the winnable, survivable nuclear holocaust, a petulant and
terrifically arrogant attempt to control the language in which the idea of
nuclear war would be discussed with a government-made language.

This simple (1953) pamphlet was a product of the Federal
Civil Defense Administration and was a public document, though it replaced the
edition of 1952, which was a “restricted document”. (We are also warned that if we have this
earlier document that we are to burn it, even though the information contained “as
no longer of a classified nature”.) It
outlined the cities and regions in the United States that would be the
subject of an attack. “City” is
redefined here as a “Target Area for Civil Defense Purposes”, and then
redefined in terms of a greater population as a “Critical Target Area for Civil
Defense Purposes”. There were 193 such “areas”
defined, of which 70 were “critical targets” encompassing a population of 67
million. (I hate to say it, but if you
were to map the “critical” zones it would look much like the Blue State map of 2008.)

I am surprised to see that my own little city, Asheville
(N.C.), makes the list for a “target area”, somehow, as one of the four cities
mentioned for North Carolina. I have no idea why, except that it is the
seat of a sort-of populous county–there
was nothing here of interest to the Soviets.
On the other hand there are two cities specified forNew
Mexico, both of which are 70 miles or so east of the Los Alamos installation.

The unnamed author(s) warn the reader that the 100+ million
people specified in the two major attack areas was open to a greater blanket
attack than described, what with the number of warheads available and all—everyone
was subject to being bombed. Also, the
whole issue of chemical and biological weapons was not addressed: ‘therefore, the resources of the entire
country outside the listed target areas, as well as within them, must be
mobilized for civilian defense”.

The only mobilization for defense was that against fear–there really wasn’t anything else worth talking about.

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Bad Ideas
Ethnic Cleansing, the Philippines and Singapore and General Yamashita, 1942-1945
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This is a rare offset printing of the statement of charges
and “outline of particulars” against the Japanese Imperial Army General Tomoyuki
Yamashita (1885-1946), a man accused of war crimes against humanity. After he was captured 2 September 1945,
General Yamashita was arraigned principally for failing to control his troops,
segments of which had acted brutally in their treatment of residents of
captured Singapore and
against British Empire soldiers. He was
charged with “unlawfully disregarding and failing to discharge his duty as a
commander to control the acts of members of his command by permitting them to
commit war crimes.” This was in
direct violation the doctrine of “command responsibility” which was established
by the Hague Conventions IV (1907) and X
(1907), and—after in re
Yamashita—would also become known as the “Yamashita standard”, in which courts
clearly accepted that “a commander’s actual knowledge of unlawful actions is
sufficient to impose individual criminal responsibility”. Yamashita would be
found guilty by the U.S. Military Tribunal and was sentenced to death, for “vengeful
actions are widespread offences and there is no effective attempt by a
commander to discover and control the criminal acts, such a commander may be
held responsible, even criminally liable.”
It was a death sentence for a crime of omission. (As early as the 6^thcentury BCE, Sun Tzu,
in his Art of War, stipulated that it was a commander’s duty to ensure that his
subordinates conducted themselves in a civilized manner during an armed
conflict.)

Getting back to the war:
after Yamashita captured Singapore in February 1942, accepting the
surrender of General Arthur Percival and 100,000+ British Army soldiers, a
steel wind policy was instituted, with thousands of people—soldiers and
civilians—finding their end at the point of Japanese soldiers’ bayonets.

Chief among the atrocities was the Sook Ching movement, a
concerted, pervasive and prolonged ethnic cleansing of Singapore of
anti-Japanese “undesirable” elements.
Among these groups were included (and this list is taken from a rather
good contribution to the dubious Wikipedia):
- Persons who had been active
  in the China Relief Fund.
- Rich men who had given most
  generously to the Relief Fund.
- Adherents of Tan Kah
  Kee, leader of the Nanyang
  National Salvation Movement.
- Hainanese,
  who were believed to be communists.
- China-born Chinese who came
  to Malaya after the 1937 Sino-Japanese
  War.
- Men with tattoo
  marks, who were believed to be members of secret
  societies, specifically Triads.
- Persons who fought for the
  British as volunteers against the Japanese.
- Government servants and men
  who were likely to have pro-British sympathies, such as Justices of the Peace, and members of
  the Legislative Council.
- Persons who possessed arms
  and tried to disturb public safety.
In short, it didn’t take all that much to be considered for
elimination, and a long and frozen fear and ruthless hearts-and-minds- campaign
was instituted which lasted until the Philippines were finally liberated. And it was for the Japanese actions in the Philippines, and then principally in Manila, that General Yamashita was tried, despite the effects
of his long and terrible reach across South East Asia

Most
of the British and Australian prisoners incarcerated in Singapore’s Changi Prison would never
make it out. Other segments of the POWs
would be transported on hell ships for forced slave labor throughout the
Japanese Empire. The Siam-Burma death
railroad (surfaced in the Pierre Boullee novel The Bridge on the River Kwai) received other portions of these
POWs; on that 258-mile railroad upwards of 180,000 Asian slave laborers and
60,000 Allied POWs were put to work in horrific and desperate conditions—90,000
of the Asian and 16,000 of the Allied would be killed during the construction
(though many estimates are markedly higher than this). The Sandakan
airstrip in North Borneo was another death receptacle
of these POWs: 3,600 Indonesian slave
laborers and 2,300 Allied POWs were set to work here—only 6 Allied POWs
(Australian escapees) survived.

In re Yamashita focused
on the Philippines and the battleground that it was turned into by Yamashita, costing the civilian
population more than 100,000 lives. Tomoyuki Yamashita was hanged on 23
February 1946 at Los Banos Prison Camp, 30 miles south of the city in which he
caused so much misery.
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Militaria
Fantastic and Inscrutable Titles: God and the Asylum of Ignorance. (Nazis by any other name…)

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Asa Turian, the author of this 1938 Outsider Logic pamphlet, was sort of steeped, in a light way, in gathering quotes from the moderns and the ancients–in the end, none of them seem to help. Ultimately he seems to me to create some new vocabulary to repackage the NSDAP, which even in 1938 was still gathering frothy American pro-Bund crowds at Madison Square Garden. (The scion of American Olympic sports and head of the International Olympic Committee, the Nazi/racist Avery Brundage*, spoke to a crowd of 20,000+ American Bundists at The Garden in 1938, finding little fault with the Nazis. He went on to a long and distinct career– some of which in deep furtherance of his political ideologies–as did thousands of other pro-Nazis.) The title is taken from Exodus 32:1 and is a plea, very late in the Depression, from Turian to find some sort of Moses to lead the United States out of the despairing economic situation. He notes that although many people were talking about the depression, no one was talking (like Mark Twain’s complaint about people discussing the weather) about what to do about it. Which is odd because FDR had been hammering away at it for six years by the time this pamphlet was written. No matter for Turian, who doesn’t bother mentioning Roosevelt.

After quoting many, Turian suggests that the way out of the Depression was via a light Dictatorship (“an alternative between Democracy and Dictatorship by means of the separation of Government and Industry”) that defies simple explanation. Half-way through this Bush-IQ-thin text the Democracy part of this partnership slips away, saying simply that “we must maintain our present form of Government and resort to Dictatorship as well”. I think that the way this plays out is that a combination of democracy and dictatorship is just a dictatorship. Industry is divided from government, and then would be further divided “between Capital and Labor” and then “running it on a partnership basis” governed by the Corporate Dictatorship. He further suggests getting rid of money and putting the entire economy on a 100-billion (the unit of measurement not explained) “bartership basis”. I have no idea how this barter would work overseas, as international trade doesn’t come up at all in Turian’s economic homage to liberation logic, though there is a lot of discussion of “state controllership” and “the status of the corporation dictatorship”. There are some other societal revolutions that come and go, but the biggest of them all was the establishment of some sort of economico-religico tripartate God/Mammon/Something Else oracle to lead us away from all bad economic temptation. Wow. I’m not sure exactly what the author was getting at, but if you take away the barter bit, it sounds quite a bit like Nazism in different terminology. I guess this just goes to show you that you can Reality-Compromised and still come up with either (a) your own version of Nazism or (b) a paint-by-numbers Nazi who changes the colors but not the numbers.

*I’d like to discuss Brundage more fully at some point. For now, let’s just say that he was a man without quality. It was Brundage who sold out Jim Thorpe in a rant against professionalism in the Olympics but who said nothing about the Olympic industry and paid Olympians in the Soviet Bloc. It was Brundage who disqualified and exiled Tommie Smith and John Carlos in Mexico ’68 for their giving the Black Power salute but who said nothing at all about the Nazi salute in his highly cherished 1936 Berlin games. And it was Brundage who cluster fucked the 1972 Munich Olympics–in ways too numerous to go into here–and who allowed the games to continue after a one day interruption following the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by the Black September Palestinian terrorist group. Brundage, as President of the IOC, spoke at the ceremony the day the Olympics restarted, and unbelievably equated the massacre of the Israelis with the boycott of the racist all-white Rhodesian team: (the bold is mine, just in case):
“The Games of the XXth Olympiad have been subject to two savage attacks. We lost the Rhodesian
battle against naked political blackmail. I am sure that the public
will agree that we cannot allow a handful of terrorists to destroy this
nucleus of international cooperation and goodwill we have in the
Olympic movement. The Games must go on….”

Why the man wasn’t struck by lightning on the spot and turned into carbon sizzle is a sacred mystery. I am sure that a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion must’ve been on his library shelf. Or half-shelf.

The man was utterly shameful, and yet was the leading American for the Olympics for almost thirty years.

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Bad Ideas — Outsider Logic
The Alpha and Omega of “40”

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Perhaps this is more the Alpher and Omeger of the concept of 40, but, then, one never knows about these things, even when they’re pronounced in the manner of Mr. Eugene Krabs (a Spongebob reference; Mr. Krabs tends to put “er” at the end of words ending in “a”, like “spatuler”).

Ah, well.

The warnings of death AND light beginning at 40 seems to be a little contradictory, a little bit of singularity happening at a place that I left behind 12 years ago. But all these beautifully designed pamphlets are yelling about is traffic speed and life insurance: traffic deaths start piling up at 40 m.p.h. and men (not women) should start buying life insurance then because their big earnings years “come to light”.

These pamphlets are both part of my Naive Surreal Collection–works that seem commonplace and standard when they were published but whose context is decidedly antiquarian and semi-existent in 2009. Often the best part of these pamphlets are their covers, though they can all be mined for the forgotten social ephemera that lurks just beneath their surface. But in these cases it is really just the incredibly arcane messages in the artwork that I find most interesting.

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Fantastic Titles — Impossible Books
Private Smoe, Latrine Orderly, and a Sub-History of the Word “Latrine” in the Titles of Books in English

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Is it possible that James Steveson’s Paddington : report on the necessity of latrine accommodation for women in the Metropolis, published in 1879, is the first book published in English to use the word “latrine” in the title?! Well, in a lightly interesting and perhaps stupefying way, the answer is “yes”. And this just to get to this very obscure graphic.cartoon book, Smoe, the Latrine Orderly, by H.E. Swinney, published by the Ledger Company in Fort Worth, Texas. According to WorldCat/OCLC, the massive cataloging tool used by librarians everywhere, there aren’t any copies of this book in any library anywhere in the world. I’m both surprised and underwhelmed. The cartoons all appeared in the Fort Worth Army Air Field’s newspaper “Lone Star Scanner”, which is also a publication that doesn’t seem to have survived anywhere. H.E. Swinney may be Sergeant H.E. Swinney, who was present at Pearl Harbor on 7 December and who fought his way through WWII, though I’m not sure.

The pamphlet’s jokes and cartoons I can appreciate as having been funny once upon a time, making people laugh as they snapped their newspapers over their eggs at the PX. Maybe they made people laugh for a few years, but probably not much more. It makes me think for just a little about the average age for how long jokes are “funny”. I’d say that the Smoe funny lasted about 2 years 5 months and 5 days. More or less.

The word “latrine” is from the French and from the Latin before that, and appears fairly early in English (1642 according to my 1933 OED), but for whatever reason, it just doesn’t find its way into the title of any English books for more than two hundred years.

The reason I’m spending any time at all on this little pamphlet is because its title is so entirely unexpected. And that, as the man said, is all I have to say about that.

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Fantastic Titles — Impossible Books — Outsider Logic
The History of the Future, Living Life Backwards, and a Wordle of Benjamin Button

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Beginning life with the final kiss of a Shakespearean comedy is far more complex than it is interesting. The ordeal of Benjamin Button, a current movie based on the 1922 short story by Scott Fitzgerald (found in his collection Tales of the Jazz Age), presents some very curious aspects of the physics of life–especially if it is more than just Mr. Button who gets to live their life out again in reverse. It also isn’t a very wide genre of literature, so far as I know. Another good example of a life lived backwards is the book Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis, who tells the story of a problematic character named Tod T. Friendly. (“Tod T. Friendly” is also “Todt Friendly” or “death friendly, taking a piece of his name from German, which evidently Mr. Friendly was.) On the other hand, the novel Stuart, a Life Lived Backwards doesn’t make the cut, as Stuart does live his life forwards. Christopher Homm, (homme?) written by C.H. Sissons in 1965, tells the story of the title character backwards, though his life is lived forwards as well.

(CLICK to enlarge.)

The idea of the future, or the having of a future, seems like it should be an ancient idea, and it is–though it isn’t necessarily a universal idea. Mesopotamians, Babylonians, Mayans embraced the idea of vast distances of time; early Christian faith, o the other hand, doesn’t necessarily have a great future, what with time ending at Judgment Day. Hinduism and Buddhism have a sense of the future, though there is some very problematic circularity involved with it. The true scientist bits about the concrete possibilities of vast amounts of time extending into the millennia are found in Charles Lyell (Principles of Geology) who in 1830 took up some earlier work and made it possible to think of the age of the earth in terms of millions of years. Charles Darwin was also a cultivator of the past and possible future, as was Hermann von Helmholtz, who predicted the ultimate age of the sun, meaning that time’s arrow had the possibility of being hundreds of millions of years long. These were startling, epochal ideas, and all came within a period of thirty years, creating for the world a fluidity of scientific thought such as had never been seen. The future came to life in the hands of novelists like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley, not to mention the fabulous worlds of Robert Heinlein (who launched his terrific series of articles on the history of the future in the March 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction–just a month after John W. Campbell had evidently coined the term in the same magazine. I can’t leave this without mentioning Edward Bellamy, a great trailblazer in this area of thought, and his work Looking Backwards, which was a view of a socialist utopia live din the year 2000 by an 1887 man who had fallen into a 113-year-long sleep.

But the difficult part of multiple people living their lives backwards comes in the multiplicity of changes that would be caused by two actors adjusting their behavior for the “future” based on lives they had already “lived”. I can’t imagine the implications of the “butterfly effect” when spread across a broader spectrum than just Mr. Button.

I haven’t seen the movie, but I have now read the Fitzgerald story, and the idea is very disturbing, like coming out of Alzheimer’s to climb right back in again. The worst of it seems t take place not at the end of the reverse life, but right before–Mr. Button enters Harvard as a genius sportsman with his years of expertise and learning already under his belt–four years later, though, as a senior, he is struggling, his brain and mind slipping away, his knowledge restricted to that of a 16-year old boy. And it just gets worse from there, though his ability to distinguish his diminishing capacity grows dimmer and dimmer, thankfully, the closer he comes to his cradle grave. Its a difficult story to read.

(In a cursory look I don’t see anything interesti9ng with anything read backwards in Mr. Button’s story.)

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Outsider Logic — Perception — WORD art